Three men jailed for passing teenage girl between them for sex

Sajid Ali, 38, Zaheer Iqbal, 40, and Riaz Makhmood, 39, have been jailed for 20 years at Sheffield Crown Court for sexually assaulting a 13 year old.

The victim who was 13 at the time was passed around by the three of them.

Judge David Dixon told the three they had “groomed, coerced and intimidated’ their victim and treated her ‘like a thing”, as he passed sentence yesterday.

The underage girl believed that Iqbal and Zaheer were her friends and sajid was her boyfriend, but she was just passed around for sex

The offences occurred in the mid –nineties when the defendants were teenagers themselves, the victim only came forward in 2014.

The victim claims she was scared of them as they threatened to tell her mother

The victim told investigators: ‘They would say “you’ve done that for him, will you do it for me”. You felt like you were wanted – it was nice to have attention from boys.”

“I felt like I was fat and horrible and when they said I was rubbish at oral sex I wanted to be better at it.”

The victim started to suffer from anxiety, depression and eating disorders as a result of her ordeal, the court heard.

The prosecutor Sophie Drake read a victim impact statement which said: “I’ve tried every day to put these things behind me and while I manage most of the time they still haunt me.”

After the three men were convicted of a total of 15 counts of indecent assault, Judge David Dixon told them: “The offences involved the exploitation and abuse by all three of you together of what at the time was a young and vulnerable girl.”

“She was groomed, coerced and intimated, she was called abusive names and she was treated like a thing, a thing that you passed around among yourselves.”

Ali and Iqbal, from Masbrough, Rotherham, were sentenced to seven and half years.

Makhmood, was jailed for six years and nine months.

Speaking after the verdicts, Tarryn McCaffrey, from the CPS, said: “Ali, Iqbal and Makhmood groomed the victim to make her believe she was their friend.”

“Far from acting as friends, they used her vulnerability to force her to perform sex acts on them on a number of occasions after giving her alcohol.”

“All three denied indecent assault but the case put forward by the CPS, including evidence from the victim and proof that the defendants knew each other and continued to visit each other after one left the area, saw them convicted by the jury.”

“This case demonstrates how the passage of time is not a barrier to pursuing sexual offenders and I would like to pay tribute to the victim who found the strength to come forward and support this prosecution.”

Rotherham is one of a number of towns in which widespread sexual grooming of young girls has been exposed.

The issue of child abuse in the town first came to light in 2010 when five men were jailed for sexual offences against under-age girls.

A 2014 inquiry found there were more than 1,400 victims of grooming and sex exploitation in Rotherham between 1997 and 2013.